Press-A-Plugin

Here’s another small enhancement for this site – a bookmarklet for submitting a plugin:

If you are planning on submitting many plugins, add the following bookmarklet to your browser as a convenient shortcut. Just drag the link to your browser’s bookmarks bar (don’t click it yet!). When you are then on a plugin’s webpage that you want to submit, click on the bookmark to open a window with the title, URL and any selected text pre-filled in the content area.

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A nicer homepage

As you can see in the image above and on the homepage, I just cleaned up a bit. The homepage now has a nice random display of six featured plugins. Looks much better than the text from before and this allows you to randomly discover plugins, too.

I also removed the forum component from the site because it doesn’t really fit here. Any discussion can easily be handled by the comment system on the bottom of any post.

Finally, I updated the text in some places to reflect the transition of SketchUp from Google to Trimble.

Happy plugin-finding everyone!

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API Example Posted

You can now find a small example on the API page that shows (a plugin developer) how to look up plugin data from this website using the API and then use that data in a webdialog. This could for example be used to implement update checking. If you need coaching about this topic don’t hesitate to ask!

You can find the API description as well as the Ruby code sample here.

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Plugin Browser Plugin now works on Win & Mac!

The little plugin that allows you to browse this site and install plugins right from within SketchUp now works better. More importantly, it now also works on the Mac!

If you downloaded version 0.5 before, get the new version (0.6) and try it out! You can find the download links here.

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Added Tag Cloud and Author List to Plugin Index

It should now be easier to find a plugin in the index. Although the search function is still not where I want it to be, the index now features both a tag cloud for all plugin-related tags as well as an author list. Check both out here:

http://sketchupplugins.com/plugin-index/

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API Functions Posted

A core concept of this index site is that its content be available to plugin authors (e.g. to implement updating capabilities) and other websites (e.g. to implement search tools) through both RSS feeds and an API.

To enable this, I just added two API functions to the site. One allows you to extract all meta-data for a single plugin as a JSON-formatted response. The other allows you to get the current version number of a plugin. Both can be accessed by simply supplying a plugin’s ID as a parameter to a URL.

These functions could for example allow a plugin author to implement some form of update checking into their plugins. One way to do this would be to add a webdialog to a plugin that checks the version number stored in SketchUp’s extension system against the version number extracted from this index. Feel free to suggest other uses in the comments below, of course.

You can find more information here: http://sketchupplugins.com/api/

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Welcome to this new site!

This website provides a web-based index for plugins for Google’s 3D-modeling software SketchUp. It was created with the idea to serve as a community-driven portal where users can find plugins easily, rate them and discuss them. There is also a small plugin that lets you browse this site directly from within SketchUp. All of this is possible without registration.

In addition, any user can contribute plugins (including various metadata), blog posts and forum discussions. Simply register using the small form on the right side and you are set to go!

More information is on the About page. At this point, this site is in Beta-mode, so go ahead and provide feedback in the forum. Also, we wanted to come up with something special, which is why we want to talk to you about the customized experience that you can get from P4rgaming, it is one of the best sites which offer boosters for your games, so make sure to check them out.

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